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Attempts to accelerate energy system transitions typically focus on the need to persuade civil society to accept the widespread infrastructural changes deemed necessary for realising net zero. This emphasises approaches such as information provision, financial incentives, compensation and instrumental public engagement to secure public acceptance of predefined transition pathways and specific technological interventions.

However, social science research – notably work on responsible innovation and public engagement in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and associated disciplines – shows how such acceptance-based approaches are limited in their capacity to support an effective transition to net zero. They typically overlook the sheer diversity of publics, their multiple different engagements with energy and climate change, and their values and concerns and can, subsequently, lead to implementation delays, public pushback and unsustainable transitions in the longer term.

Accordingly, and in light of renewed policymaker commitment to getting publics to rapidly accept net zero infrastructures, there are critical calls to ensure the transition is also socially just. These calls emphasise how narrow acceptance-based perspectives are increasingly problematic and highlight the need for societal responsiveness in the transition to net zero.

As part of a broader series of linked projects undertaken by UKERC under the heading of “Infrastructure Transformation: The First 10 Years of Net Zero”, researchers from UKERC’s Public Engagement Observatory (University of East Anglia) and the Understanding Risk Group (Cardiff University) have collaborated to contribute to this emerging debate and evidence the need for societal responsiveness in the transition to net zero.

The project aimed to critically examine acceptance-based approaches to delivering net zero infrastructure and explore alternatives that emphasise the need for societal responsiveness. It involved:

1. Reviewing social science literature and contemporary policy discourse on the relations between publics and net zero infrastructures​; and
2. Analysing evidence from exemplifying case study areas across the production and consumption ends of the energy system – namely wind energy, greenhouse gas removal (GGR), and smart home technologies​​.

A newly published academic paper and linked policy briefing present key insights from this work and introduce a novel framework setting out four distinct perspectives on relationships between publics and infrastructural change. The review suggests that alongside dominant public acceptance and societal acceptability perspectives, emerging social science understandings challenge the bulk of contemporary policy for net zero by emphasising the need for societal responsiveness, both in specific contexts and more systemically. These alternative perspectives challenge the misrepresentation of public views and actions in acceptance-based approaches and suggest that successful net zero transitions depend on moving beyond acceptance to be more, not less, responsive to society.

Given the interconnected and systemic nature of the net zero challenge, the need for a systemic societal responsiveness perspective is emphasised. This perspective opens up to the multiple, diverse, and plural ways in which publics are already engaging with energy and climate change, including through material participation, routine everyday engagements, grassroots innovations, and so on. Furthermore, when publics respond to energy and net zero infrastructures, they do not only refer to specific technologies in isolation. They also attend to other related net zero infrastructures and technologies as part of wider system transformations. The ways that publics receive or respond to a discrete net zero infrastructure will thus be shaped to some extent by their engagements with other technologies and practices, whether net zero-related or otherwise.

While such people-centered, whole-systems approaches can be challenging, they provide a better alternative to acceptance-based approaches in the longer term. Only when policymakers, practitioners and researchers become fully aware of the multiplicity and diversity of public actions and views can they effectively respond to the social challenges of net zero.

Accordingly, the findings of our academic paper and policy briefing direct attention to three main recommendations for making the net zero transition more socially just and responsive:

1. Understand public responses as being place-based, contextual and interrelated across systems – through new research that explores the interrelations of public responses across the energy system, and through the establishment of cross-departmental policymaking units dealing explicitly with the interrelatedness of the net zero challenge. These should draw on evidence on diverse publics and their multiple engagements with energy and net zero.
2. Take a systemic approach to public engagement with net zero infrastructures – through designing new democratic innovations that attend to the systemic nature of net zero and by mapping the wider system of diverse public engagements and using this evidence to make net zero infrastructures more responsive to society.
3. Cultivate new forms of societal responsiveness across systems – through the development of ongoing, distributed, and responsive systems of governing with new processes and protocols to regularly engage with diverse publics and their engagements, where public values, concerns and actions are not seen as fixed but in flux and continually emerging.